Digital camera zooming based on unified CFA image processing steps

Abstract

A unified camera image processing system that performs zooming and full color image reconstruction for single-sensor digital cameras is introduced. Compact and low-cost single-sensor solutions often lack optical zooming capabilities and thus depend on digital techniques. However, the computational power required for high-quality output using traditional techniques is generally too prohibitive to implement in such devices. The proposed scheme employs a small number of reusable, low-complexity operations and a consistent color model throughout to achieve high-quality zoomed output that is practical for hardware implementation. The high-level system components are color filter array (CFA) zooming, CFA interpolation (demosaicking) and demosaicked image postprocessing. The resulting output is consistently superior to other methods.